


Ephemera

by DesireeArmfeldt



Category: due South
Genre: Developing Relationship, Happy Ending, House Cleaning, Insecurity, M/M, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-04
Updated: 2013-04-04
Packaged: 2017-12-07 10:23:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/747432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesireeArmfeldt/pseuds/DesireeArmfeldt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fraser has issues, Ray has intuition, the abstract is the concrete, and love is in the details.  Also, in the furniture.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ephemera

**Author's Note:**

> Look! I've posted something that isn't a snippet! It also isn't any of the projects on my queue of things-to-finish.

“Fraser, what are you doing?”

He looked up at me over his shoulder, pausing with the sponge hovering over the tiles.

“I’m cleaning your shower, Ray,” he told me in his stating-the-blindingly-obvious voice.

“Yeah, thanks, I can see that,” I grumbled.  “You know, it really wasn’t that dirty.” 

Which it wasn’t, because ever since Fraser had started spending the night at my place regular, he’d taken to cleaning things.  Not just cleaning up after himself, which hey, it only takes an extra second to be polite when you’re a guest.  No, I’m talking actual housework: scrubbing the bathroom and the kitchen, picking up the living room, taking out the trash.  The place was cleaner than it’d ever been since I moved in.  He’d given the bathroom a top-to-bottom cleaning the weekend before, but here he was, about to waste a perfectly good Saturday morning doing it again.

And he did clean up after himself, too, relentlessly.  Any dish he used, he washed right away, dried it and put it away.  He made the bed when we got up in the morning; half the time he changed the sheets and pilowcases, too.  And he must have wiped down the shower every time he used it, because I’d never found a single dark hair anywhere in the bathroom, not even in the friggin’ trash can.

“What are you trying to do,” I asked.  “Make sure there’s no evidence to show you were ever here?”

I was just teasing—well, all right, it was one of those jokes that is secretly maybe a little bit true.  But Fraser stared up at me like I’d just stuck a knife in his gut.  Pale-faced and kind of glassy-eyed, and I seriously wondered if he was about to puke or something.

“Hey, hey.”  I crowded into the shower to kneel beside him.  He flinched when I touched his back, but before I could pull my hand back, he buried his face in my shoulder.  So I put my arms around him and just held him loosely, with the wet tiles digging into my knees and the Lysol fumes going to my head, while he leaned against me and didn’t move or make a sound.

“It’s okay,” I said.  “I’m sorry I’m such a slob.  Must drive you nuts, living—hanging around with me.”

His head came up and he stared into my face for a second.  Then he was on me, shoving me into the corner, kissing the breath out of me as he worked my soggy sweatpants down with one hand, and then jerking me off hard and fast but somehow not rough at all, just gently and insistently blowing my mind, his mouth glued to mine the whole time.  We were both pretty wet and sticky after that, so I made him take his clothes off and turn the shower on.  I blew him, then I scrubbed him clean, while the water flowed down the drain, washing away the mess we’d made.

 

                                    *                                    *                                    *

 

It wasn’t long after that that his things started appearing around the apartment.  I don’t know exactly when, because it took me a while to notice.  Toothbrush, razor, hairbrush.  Dog dish so Dief didn’t have to drink out of a cereal bowl.  One of those egg things you put tea leaves in if you a) ever drink tea and b) don’t make it out of tea bags like normal people.  Spare socks and underwear and that old white sweater, all neatly tucked away in the corner of my shirt drawer.  Library book on the coffee table.

But it was little stuff, everyday stuff you don’t notice, and somehow I never saw him bring anything in, it was just there, like it had always been there.  And he was around most of the time, so it was only natural for his stuff to be there for him to use.  It was only when I went to get out my suit for a court date and found a brown uniform hanging next to it in my closet—and I couldn’t for the life of me think when Fraser had brought over a whole uniform—that I realized that all this stuff hadn’t been there before, but now it was. 

And he didn’t even have a key to the apartment.

So, okay, probably at that point the smart thing to do would have been to just say something to him about it.  But I didn’t, because. . .well, I guess because he hadn’t said anything.  It felt like a challenge, almost, like he was waiting to see if I’d notice, what I’d do. 

So, what I did was move stuff around to make space.  Emptied out a drawer in the dresser and a shelf in the medicine cabinet; put up a hook in the bathroom to hang up his razor strop; rearranged the coat closet so there was room for more boots at the bottom.  I put down a couple of old blankets in the corner that Dief had already staked out as his territory months before.  Fraser noticed all this, obviously, but he never mentioned it, so I didn’t either.  But the drawer filled up with shirts and there were boots in the closet and books on the night table, and one night Fraser brought over this weird little pocket guitar and we stayed up half the night teaching each other songs, and after that the guitar lived on the shelf over my stereo.

I started keeping the place cleaner, too.  Not that I’ll ever be a neat-freak like Fraser, but I made an effort to pick up, and on weekends I’d do some scrubbing.  If Fraser was there, he’d pitch in—and really, it was pretty unusual for him _not_ to be at my place on a weekend morning, now.  Whatever the deal in the bathroom had been, he didn’t seem to have any problem with cleaning it; weirdly, it was the kitchen he wouldn’t touch.  I made sure to stock up on stuff Fraser liked when I bought groceries.  Sometimes he’d come along with me to run errands, like he didn’t have anything better to do with his day off, and either we’d end up chasing purse snatchers, or we’d come home with a five gallon jug of white vinegar that he stuck under the sink because he claimed it was better than commercial cleaning products.

 

                                    *                                    *                                    *

 

“You know what you need, Fraser?”  We were walking down the street on our way to catch a movie, and it was nice weather so all the used furniture stores had stuff out on the sidewalk, hoping to lure customers.

“What?” he asked, humoring me.

“A dresser.  You need a dresser.”

“I don’t have room for a dresser.  Where would I put it?”

“Well. . .”  I hadn’t thought that far ahead.  I closed my eyes, visualizing the bedroom, trusting Fraser to keep me from walking into anything.  “If we moved the bed into the corner, we could fit both dressers along the opposite wall, couldn’t we?  There’s got to be, what, six or seven feet of wall there before the door?”

I opened my eyes to discover that Fraser had dropped behind.  In fact, he was standing still in the middle of the sidewalk like he’d been turned into a telephone pole or something.  As I turned back to him, he turned away from me to stare into the window of the store we’d just passed.

“See anything you like?” I asked.

He made a noncommittal noise.  I glanced at his reflection in the window and saw it looking back at me.

“Hold that thought,” I told him.  “Don’t move.  I’ll be back in a minute.”

It was only a couple of blocks to the hardware store; less than ten minutes for them to cut duplicates of my apartment keys.  As the guy handed them over, I thought, _what the hell?_ , and had him cut a spare for the GTO, too.

When I got back to Fraser, he was still standing in front of that store window, like maybe he’d taken my command extra-literally.  He’d picked up an entourage of women, though: one sales clerk who sounded like she was describing every piece of furniture in the store, plus two customers or passers-by or who knows what, who were chiming in with advice about interior decorating.

I shouldered between them and gave Fraser a poke in the arm.

“Got you something,” I told him. 

“Oh?”  He raised his eyebrows.

I almost just pressed the keys into his hand right there, but I couldn’t, not in front of those women.  I didn’t know how he was going to react, but it wasn’t for them to see.

So instead I said, “Show you when we get home.  What do you think, is there anything here worth getting?”

His palm dropped down on a beat-up old wooden dresser with chipped baby-blue paint, while his eyes never left my face.

“I thought this might do,” he said.

“Jeez, Fraser, it’s a piece of junk.”

“It just needs to be fixed up.”

I should have taken him to a real furniture store, I realized.  Bullied him into getting something decent.  But it’s not like I’d planned any of this in advance.  The idea just popped into my head and I went with my gut.

“Hey, okay, no skin off my nose.”  I held up my palms placatingly.  The last thing I wanted was to fight about it.  “You like it, let’s get it.”

The lady was only too happy to sell us the dresser, which Fraser wouldn’t let me spring for.  But then it turned out—and really, I shouldn’t have been surprised by this—that the store didn’t deliver stuff; you had to haul it away yourself.

“I don’t know if that’ll fit into the back of the goat,” I said dubiously.  “And I’m not scratching up my paintwork for the sake of a thirty-dollar bunch of kindling.”

“This is why I don’t usually buy anything larger than I can carry,” said Fraser with a shrug.  He started to turn away like he was just going to walk out and leave the damned thing there, which pissed me off.

“Who says we can’t carry it?  Two guys, six blocks, piece of cake.”

He gave me a funny look, but all he said was, “Right you are, Ray.”

And I was right, and it did fit in the bedroom, too, just like I said.

Half an hour later, I was lounging on the bed watching Fraser move his clothes into the new dresser, when he just got stuck and stood there looking down at his half-full drawer and his hands full of boxer shorts.

“What?” I asked, when it was clear he wasn’t going to snap out of it.

He took such a long time to answer that I’d just about figured he wasn’t going to. 

“It doesn’t seem like much,” he said, real quietly.  And he had a point: a few pairs of shorts, a sweater, a couple of shirts, a couple of pairs of jeans; the dresser wasn’t even half-full.

I scooted off the bed and put an arm around his waist, fishing in my pocket with my other hand.  Laid the keys down on the bare top of the dresser.

“Room for plenty more,” I said.

He pulled me in close, wrapping his arms tight around me, but I could feel him shaking his head. 

Not knowing what else to say, I offered, “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“I want to,” he said into my hair.

“Then what—?” 

“I want to,” he repeated, like one of us needed convincing.  Or maybe he just wanted to shut me up.

“Okay, then.”  I still didn’t know what the head-shaking was about, but you can’t say I don’t know how to take a hint.

“Thank you,” he said, and just kept hanging onto me.  He didn’t let go for a good long while.  I didn’t mind one bit.

 

                        *                                    *                                    *

 

“You mind if I join you?” I asked, hesitating in the doorway of the bedroom.

Fraser looked up from his open trunk and made a welcoming gesture, so I came all the way in.  With the trunk at the foot of the bed and the two dressers, there wasn’t a lot of floor space, and Fraser was sitting on most of it, surrounded by neat piles of leather-bound notebooks.  I picked my way around him and lay down on my stomach on the bed to watch him pick through the contents of the trunk.  There wasn’t much in there apart from the journals: a few photos,  a compass, some carved wooden thingamajigs, a furry hat.

“It was about the only thing that survived the fire,” he said.  “The two fires.  But then, I’ve always travelled light.”

“Something to be said for that,” I said, not sure if he was looking for conversation or sympathy or if he was just thinking out loud.  “Me, I’m a total pack-rat.”

He didn’t say anything right away.  I watched him turn the compass over and over in his hand.

“My father would say it’s silly to get sentimental over keepsakes.  After all, memories live in your head, in your heart.  Things are just things.”

“Well, sure, that’s true, but it’s nice to have the things, too.  Sometimes, you need something you can look at.  Something you can touch.”  I scootched forward until my hand could reach his shoulder, but he didn’t raise his head. 

“Something to remind you they were real,” he said, so soft I almost didn’t hear him.

I moved my hand under his chin and gently tilted his face up so he had to look at me.

“Hey, I’m right here, you know,” I told him.  “Not going anywhere.”

“I know,” he said, reaching up to touch my face like I was touching his.  He sounded sincere enough, but his eyes were still sad.

  

            *                                    *                                    *

 

 “Well, so much for the only-buy-things-you-can-carry rule.”  I flopped down on the new couch, which the delivery guys had only managed to get into the apartment after we’d taken the door off its hinges.  Even so, the back was kind of scuffed up from being shoved through the doorway.

“Perhaps we need to institute an only-buy-things-that-fit-through-the-door rule,” said Fraser, smiling as he stowed the screwdriver in the toolbox.  He stashed the toolbox back in the coat closet and came to sit beside me.  I lay down with my head in his lap and rested my heels on the arm of the couch.  Unlike the old couch, which was more of a loveseat, this one was extra-long: one of the reasons I’d convinced Fraser it was the couch of our dreams.  Real comfortable, too, with cushions that were firm but not too firm, and sturdy enough that it could stand up to two grown men doing some serious making out.  Which, in not very much time at all, is what we were doing on it.

“We could—move to—the bedroom,” Fraser panted jaggedly in my ear as I worked his cock nice and slow, the way he liked best. 

“Nuh-uh.”  I was breathing just as hard as he was, and I had zero interest in pausing to relocate.  “We gotta—christen the couch.”  I groaned as Fraser rubbed me through my jeans, fast and hard, the way _I_ like it.  “For luck—y’know, like a—ooohh—battleship.”

I was just talking, if you could call it that; certainly didn’t mean it literally.  But it wasn’t too long before Fraser came hard in my hand, spunk fountaining all over both of us _and_ the couch.  A lot like a champagne bottle exploding, actually.  Me, I came in my jeans, because he’d never managed to get my cock loose from them.  The couch was roomy, but not all _that_ roomy.

After we’d both come down from orbit, and shared some slow, sweet kisses to finish things off right, I leaned down and grabbed my discarded t-shirt so I could make a stab at wiping the come off us, at least enough so we wouldn’t make more of a mess when we tried to move.  Fraser wriggled more or less upright, looking sexily disheveled, but his afterglow smile faded into an embarrassed frown as he watched me dab at the stain on the cushions.

I was still partly lying on top of his legs, so he couldn’t actually move, but when I reached for him, he turned his face away a little.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered.  “I appear to have made a mess of your—that is, of our—”

I opened my mouth to tell him not to worry about it, but never said anything, because suddenly Fraser just fell apart laughing.  Pretty soon I was laughing too, even though I had no clue what was so funny, because it was the kind of laughter you just can’t help joining in with.  Plus I’d never seen Fraser so totally caught up in laughter, so purely happy—no, not just happy, but relieved, released, something.

“You want to tell me—?” I started, when I caught my breath, but Fraser’s mouth came down on mine and kissed the living daylights out of me.

Eventually he sat up, rumpled and breathless and looking like he’d just been run over by a truck full of fairy dust.

“—what’s so funny?” I finished.

“That stain won’t come out.”  He was still smiling, but his voice wasn’t joking at all as his eyes met mine.

“It’s not a big deal—” I started, but he cut me off.

“Oh, it is, though.  It’s evidence.”

I ran my finger around the edges of the wet spot.

“What, evidence that we were too horny to make it to the bedroom?" 

“Evidence that I was here.”  Soft, dead serious voice; soft, dead serious eyes turning away to watch his own finger reach out and touch the couch like I was doing.  “Evidence that can’t be erased.”

I closed my hand over his.  His eyes came up to meet mine again, and there wasn’t a damn thing that needed to be said. 

I smiled at him.

“So. . .you’re gonna be the one who explains to my mom how that got there, then?”

That made him blush, like I figured it would, but instead of getting flustered, he just let his head drop back against the arm of the couch with that relaxed, post-sex smile creeping back over his face.

“I think we can let her draw her own conclusions, don’t you?”


End file.
